ANNA KARI: CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ANNA KÅRI worked with Save the Children UK photographing children who had been forced to fight and work for the militant groups at war in both Uganda and the DRC
AROUND 300,000 CHILDREN are directly involved in armed groups worldwide. Some fight as combatants, but many others work as porters, cooks or guards. 40 per cent of these children are girls. They are the forgotten casualties of war.Many girls are forced to become so-called ‘wives’ to soldiers, and many are kept inside houses at their military camp and submitted to horrific sexual abuse.
An estimated 3.8 million lives have been claimed by the five-year war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as a direct result of fighting: mainly from hunger and disease, making it the bloodiest conflict since the Second World War. Despite the launch of the peace process in the DRC in 2003, the transitional government in Kinshasa currently has little control over many regions of the country. In the eastern DRC thousands of girls are combatants in armed groups. Many are abducted and forced to fight, while others join up because they have no access to education, their parents are poor, and working as a soldier may seem the only option available to improving their lives.
The Ugandan government has been unable to end a brutal insurgency in the north and west of the country led by Lord’s Resistance Army rebels. Roughly 20,000 children have been abducted into the rebel group throughout the 18-year conflict. Estimates suggest that 10,000 have been abducted since 2002.As a result, every night, thousands of children living in northern Uganda trek miles to sleep in shelters in large towns, in order to avoid capture. They are all victims of the ongoing war on children.
Anna Kåri focuses on issues of human rights, migration, refugees and identity. She works extensively in the Balkans, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Southern Africa.
